I have made it a point to do at least one fun and adventurous thing every weekend. These aren't hugely exciting moments, but I'm new here and low level characters can't go around tackling turasks. We have to be content with field mice and rabid bats until we level up a few times.
Saturday's goal was the library. And, as an aside, in my world it is pronounced 'liiiiiiiiiiii-berry!' with all the kid-in-a-candy-store inflection implied in an impending visit to a 6 story monument to Free Books For All! I love libraries.
I had never been to the San Francisco Library, but I was running out of DVDs to watch and until I wise up enough to put the "Books" line item in my monthly budget, the library is much safer than Barnes and Noble. Also, as you may remember, I am already in bookshelf debt, and I'm fast running out of interim storage space on my floor. So I set off in search of free books and obscure art documentaries.
I grew up in a suburb. Our library was three rooms of books over the local police station. I remember going in there every few days and talking to the same librarian every time. Most of my elementary school existence was in the library. It was probably about a mile and a half from our house, and I'd walk down there armed with a backpack to carry the eight or twelve books I'd eventually check out. I went back last winter in anticipation of a 4 day beach New Year's, and my librarian is still there. And she looks exactly the same as she did fifteen years ago. Big glasses, gray hair, and pink sparkle lipstick.
I was completely unprepared for the monolith I arrived at when I got off the subway. The lobby reminded me of the Louvre. After a lengthy library card acquisition process, I headed up to the fourth(!) floor to browse the DVD selection. I've been avoiding Blockbuster and Netflix thus far, and after watching an amazing cuban guitar concert (Nights of Fire, by Benise. Check it out) I decided I was in the mood for some art documentaries. The library coughed up a fascinating Andy Goldsworthy video and a Cirque du Soleil performance.
As I was leaving, I noticed a small alcove just inside the door, filled with books. For Sale. The library was selling books, and like a fool, I bought one. I take comfort in the fact that it was only one. I left the physics book on the shelf, along with a lot of cookbooks and an astonishing assortment of trashy beach novels.
The book that came home with me is a collection of travel essays, a genre of writing that has lately become fascinating to me. And this particular volume has, in addition to great essays, the single best cover photograph I have ever seen. Unfortunately, the photo doesn't do it justice, but nevertheless, I give you I Should Have Stayed Home.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Saturday, August 18, 2007
My new arch nemesis: book shelves
First of all, this is really embarrassing. My arch nemesis is a class of inanimate objects. I've gone from being justifiably feared to being bested by ply wood. It's ignominious.
The book shelf conflict extends back as far as I remember, but it is only recently that the enemy has started actively fighting back.
Book shelves started out as nothing more than a hard problem. In middle school, I started reading a lot. I bought books. Other people bought books for me. And since I enjoy rereading novels, I didn't get rid of any. They started to accumulate. It was a gradual thing, and equally gradually, I started appropriating other sets of shelves in the house, as the ones in my room were inadequate.
Cut to college. I had a new problem, although I didn't realize it for years. My book collection had, up until college, been mostly limited to paperback novels. College text books are generally not paperback sized. Mostly, they're large, hardback beasts weighing multiple pounds. They're massive enough that carrying more than one at a time in a backpack is decidedly unpleasant. And by the end of my fourth year in college, I'd collected a lot of them. In addition, I'd also been slowly building up a respectable showing of art books. Art books showcase the work of particular artists or styles or movements, so they have to be large and full color.
I was justifiably proud of my book case by senior year (pt 1). It was small, but it boasted the texts of not one but two majors. The giantish presences of Dali and Raphael stood in company with the foundations of computer science. It was, in point of fact, a source of great pride.
The enemy must have sensed this, for it struck with calculated vengeance. It could not have picked a more inopportune time: this was the last night of my stay in Pittsburgh. Chris' parents and another housemate and his family had come up for graduation. Having abandoned all hope of eating at a restaurant, the college students were trying to coordinate the culinary efforts of two families in order to get dinner on the table. We did it, and I was relaxing after a good meal when I was prompted to grab something out of my room.
My room was a disaster zone. And for those of you who have seen my bedroom on a regular basis, I must stress that it was a lot worse than you're imagining. My book shelves had, in point of fact, collapsed. The shelving itself had been violently ripped off the legs and the whole unit had fallen forward, vomiting the masters of the Italian Renaissance across the room like so much bad Sri Lankan chicken. Some of the less hardy volumes were being irreparably mangled under the weight of their colossal counterparts.
You'll recall that this was the night before I had to leave, and we had company. The best I could do was to neatly pile the books and forget about it for the summer. When I returned in the fall, I went to Ikea and brought back a new set of shelves which have served me well ever since.
...until Yesterday. I noticed that Something Was Wrong. The books were not vertical, the shelves were far from horizontal, and the sides had come unpegged from everything. At this point, it was fixable. Ikea's famous peg system is fairly forgiving. I started removing the books with the intention of fitting the shelves back together. However, plywood was never meant to be a structural building material. The screws got torqued and ripped it to shreds, rendering the shelves useless.
So now, I must once again admit defeat. And furthermore, I am in the market for new shelves. And this time, they'll be made of real wood.
The book shelf conflict extends back as far as I remember, but it is only recently that the enemy has started actively fighting back.
Book shelves started out as nothing more than a hard problem. In middle school, I started reading a lot. I bought books. Other people bought books for me. And since I enjoy rereading novels, I didn't get rid of any. They started to accumulate. It was a gradual thing, and equally gradually, I started appropriating other sets of shelves in the house, as the ones in my room were inadequate.
Cut to college. I had a new problem, although I didn't realize it for years. My book collection had, up until college, been mostly limited to paperback novels. College text books are generally not paperback sized. Mostly, they're large, hardback beasts weighing multiple pounds. They're massive enough that carrying more than one at a time in a backpack is decidedly unpleasant. And by the end of my fourth year in college, I'd collected a lot of them. In addition, I'd also been slowly building up a respectable showing of art books. Art books showcase the work of particular artists or styles or movements, so they have to be large and full color.
I was justifiably proud of my book case by senior year (pt 1). It was small, but it boasted the texts of not one but two majors. The giantish presences of Dali and Raphael stood in company with the foundations of computer science. It was, in point of fact, a source of great pride.
The enemy must have sensed this, for it struck with calculated vengeance. It could not have picked a more inopportune time: this was the last night of my stay in Pittsburgh. Chris' parents and another housemate and his family had come up for graduation. Having abandoned all hope of eating at a restaurant, the college students were trying to coordinate the culinary efforts of two families in order to get dinner on the table. We did it, and I was relaxing after a good meal when I was prompted to grab something out of my room.
My room was a disaster zone. And for those of you who have seen my bedroom on a regular basis, I must stress that it was a lot worse than you're imagining. My book shelves had, in point of fact, collapsed. The shelving itself had been violently ripped off the legs and the whole unit had fallen forward, vomiting the masters of the Italian Renaissance across the room like so much bad Sri Lankan chicken. Some of the less hardy volumes were being irreparably mangled under the weight of their colossal counterparts.
You'll recall that this was the night before I had to leave, and we had company. The best I could do was to neatly pile the books and forget about it for the summer. When I returned in the fall, I went to Ikea and brought back a new set of shelves which have served me well ever since.
...until Yesterday. I noticed that Something Was Wrong. The books were not vertical, the shelves were far from horizontal, and the sides had come unpegged from everything. At this point, it was fixable. Ikea's famous peg system is fairly forgiving. I started removing the books with the intention of fitting the shelves back together. However, plywood was never meant to be a structural building material. The screws got torqued and ripped it to shreds, rendering the shelves useless.
So now, I must once again admit defeat. And furthermore, I am in the market for new shelves. And this time, they'll be made of real wood.
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